New research at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research on Educational Opportunity will focus on the implications of Indiana’s school choice laws on students’ friendships and achievements. Notre Dame sociologists Megan Andrew and Jennifer Flashman have received a $600,000 grant from the W.T. Grant Foundation and a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation. They will collect and evaluate new data about middle school students in Indiana, which is known for its robust school choice programs.

Furiously strumming his jarana into the early morning hours of a stranger’s backyard birthday party in Austin, Texas, Alex Chavez was having fun with the hired musicians who had brought him along as an impromptu guest. He was also doing fieldwork. Chavez, who joined Notre Dame’s Department of Anthropology in 2014 as an assistant professor, studies “the aesthetic dimensions of contemporary lived politics”— sometimes referred to as cultural poetics. He focuses on the unfolding of this expressive grammar among Latino migrant communities in the United States.

Is physical activity a factor in how friendships are formed? Do social circles influence a person’s health and fitness choices? A team of Notre Dame researchers hopes to explore those questions with the help of smartphone apps and wearable technology devices. Faculty members in the University’s Interdisciplinary Center for Network Science and Applications (iCeNSA) have been awarded a $3 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the relationship between social networks and health-related behaviors.

Glynn Scholar Anna Kottkamp, an environmental science major from Wenatchee, Washington, has been named valedictorian of the 2015 University of Notre Dame graduating class and will present the valedictory address during the University Commencement Ceremony on Sunday, May 17, at Notre Dame Stadium. The Commencement invocation will be offered by Brendan Bell, a political science major from Havertown, Pennsylvania.

Lewis E. Nicholson, professor emeritus of English at the University of Notre Dame, died Tuesday, April 28, at his home in South Bend. He was 93. A renowned scholar in medieval and Anglo-Saxon studies and a member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1958, Nicholson taught courses ranging from Beowulf, Chaucer, and Middle English metrical romance to classes on the Gothic language and Old Norse. For the last 18 years of his life, he directed the Hesburgh Library’s Medieval Library Initiative.

A group of Catholic scholars and Church leaders, including University of Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., will gather at the University Monday, April 27 and Tuesday, April 28 to examine the problem of polarization among American Catholics and to propose ways it might be resisted and overcome. The conference, Polarization in the U.S. Catholic Church: Naming the Wounds, Beginning to Heal, opens at 4:30 p.m. Monday in Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall auditorium.

“I’m thrilled to be a part of this project and to be in Dublin. It’s an amazing opportunity,” said Katie Brennan, a sociology major in the College of Arts and Letters. During the summer of 2014, Brennan and three other University of Notre Dame undergraduates interned on the production of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, a three-part television documentary set to air on PBS, the BBC, and Irish broadcaster RTÉ in 2016.

A new book by Notre Dame professor Ebrahim Moosa offers an expansive introduction to madrasas, the most common kind of religious schools in the Islamic world. “I wrote this book for those who are curious and eager to know what exactly transpires in these institutions,” said Moosa, professor of Islamic Studies and author of What Is a Madrasa?, recently published by the University of North Carolina Press.“I see myself as a translator between the world inside the walls of the madrasa and those on the outside.

The University of Notre Dame’s Division of Student Affairs recognized seven students at the annual Student Leadership Awards Banquet on Tuesday, March 31, six of whom majored in the College of Arts and Letters. Another award winner will be honored at the Graduate School Awards Ceremony on Friday, May 15. These annual awards recognize current students who have made exceptional contributions to the Notre Dame community.

“Women religious have tended to get pigeonholed in certain way, that either they were only praying the monastic hours or maybe just caring for their own, pastorally speaking, but they were doing much more than that,” said Katie Bugyis, a Ph.D. candidate in medieval studies through the University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute.

The University of Notre Dame will play a major role in the international celebration of the centenary of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising, which was announced Tuesday, March 31 in Dublin by Taoiseach Enda Kenny. A documentary television series, 1916: The Irish Rebellion, produced by Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will be broadcast worldwide during the centenary, which memorializes the events in Dublin on Easter Week a century ago, when an insurrection started a process that culminated in an independent Irish state and accelerated the disintegration of the British Empire.

“I actually knew that I wanted to do graduate work at Notre Dame when I was a sophomore in college,” said Amy Seymour, a Ph.D. candidate in Notre Dame’s graduate program in philosophy. Seymour chose Notre Dame, she said, because of the reputation of the University’s Center for Philosophy of Religion.

Chinese civil rights activist and former political prisoner Chen Guangcheng will give the University of Notre Dame’s 2015 Human Dignity Lecture at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 7 in the McKenna Hall Auditorium. Chen’s lecture, “Interpreting Reform: Human Dignity and Human Rights in Contemporary China,” is sponsored by Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life.

“How do we tell a more inclusive story that represents the broad and deep history of religion in the lands that became the United States?” said Thomas Tweed, the W. Harold and Martha Welch Endowed Chair in American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame.

Stefanie Israel, a Ph.D. student in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology and Ph.D. fellow in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, has been awarded a nine-month Fulbright Study-Research Grant. The prestigious funding, to begin in March 2016, will allow her to complete dissertation research in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she is conducting a comparative ethnography of four “pacified” favelas.

Robert Sedlack, associate professor of visual communication design in the Department of Art, Art History, and Design, is the recipient of the 2015 Rodney F. Ganey, Ph.D., Faculty Community-Based Research Award, given annually by the Notre Dame Center for Social Concerns. The award honors a Notre Dame faculty member whose research has made a contribution in collaboration with local community organizations.

The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism will host the spring meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) from Thursday, March 26 through Saturday, March 28 at the Notre Dame Conference Center in McKenna Hall.

Former Irish president Mary McAleese will speak on “The Irish Peace Process: Where to From Here,” at 7 p.m. Monday, March 16 in the University of Notre Dame’s McKenna Hall auditorium. McAleese joins the Notre Dame faculty this spring as Distinguished Martin and Carmel Visiting Scholar in the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies.

The University of Notre Dame’s Medieval Institute will host the Medieval Academy of America (MAA) annual conference Thursday-Saturday (March 12-14). Some 420 medieval scholars will attend the conference, at which the MAA will announce the winners of its new Olivia Remie Constable Award, established in memory of Olivia Remie Constable, Robert M. Conway Director of the Medieval Institute and professor of history at Notre Dame, who died last April.

The Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development (NDIGD) was recently awarded an $883,000 grant from the United States Department of Labor to implement an impact evaluation, determining the most effective approaches in reducing child labor. Eva Dziadula, assistant professional specialist in Notre Dame’s Department of Economics will be working closely with NDIGD throughout the evaluation.

From the University of Oxford to Michigan State University to University College Dublin, recent graduates of Notre Dame’s Ph.D. program in political science are landing choice positions, even in a competitive job market.

In summer 2015, more than 60 College of Arts and Letters students will participate in language and cultural immersion programs in 20 countries around the world, thanks to funding from Notre Dame’s Summer Language Abroad (SLA) Program. “The whole experience is truly a fantastic way to learn,” said senior Jacob Kildoo who spent summer 2014 in Muscat, Oman.

The University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Church Life (ICL) has launched a new online adult faith formation program for Hispanic Catholics. The program, Camino, is a collaborative initiative of ICL’s Satellite Theological Education Program and the Southeast Pastoral Institute.

Donald R. Keough, chair emeritus of the University of Notre Dame Board of Trustees, chair of Allen & Company, and former president and chief operating officer of the Coca-Cola Company, died Tuesday, February 24 in Atlanta with family members at his side. He was 88. “Don Keough was a celebrated business leader, a transformative philanthropist, a devout Catholic, a devoted husband and father, and a friend to so many who today mourn his passing,” said Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., Notre Dame’s president.

Anthropologist Deb Rotman, Paul and Maureen Stefanick Faculty Director of Notre Dame’s Center for Undergraduate Scholarly Engagement (CUSE), has received a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award for the 2015-16 academic year. Rotman will spend the year in Ireland, collaborating with University College Dublin and the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology on her project, “Clachans and Cultural Landscapes of County Mayo, Ireland: Local History, Folklore, and Archaeology of 19th-Century Domestic Sites.”

Thomas Tweed, the W. Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters, was elected to lead the American Academy of Religion. He is currently serving as president in 2015. Tweed is a faculty fellow in the University’s Institute for Latino Studies and Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

Twelve University of Notre Dame students, including eight from the College of Arts and Letters, have been selected by the United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) brand-new Research and Innovation Fellowship Program. They will travel to Brazil, Colombia, India, and South Africa to research global development challenges and create innovative solutions to address these issues.

Sensational reporting and commentary must be avoided in the wake of the recent murders of three Muslim college students in North Carolina, according to Ebrahim Moosa, professor of Islamic studies in the University of Notre Dame’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Department of History.

Ten University of Notre Dame students have been awarded Fulbright grants in the 2014-15 program, placing the University among the top-producing research institutions in the nation. Eight of Notre Dame’s 10 Fulbright students come from the College of Arts and Letters. The U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, Fulbright recently announced the complete list of colleges and universities that produced the most 2014-15 U.S. Fulbright students in Thursday’s edition (February 12) of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

A degree from a reputable community college has the potential to lift people out of poverty, but 60 percent of community college students drop out before they graduate. The research of economists Jim Sullivan and William Evans at Notre Dame’s Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities found that most of these students drop out as a result of non-academic obstacles. Sullivan and Evans are attempting to increase retention rates through the program Stay the Course.